I’ve spent a couple weeks now talking about self-publishing. This week I promised to talk about my actual experiences with the process, and so I started that yesterday with a little bit of a grumpy glimpse into CreateSpace’s print-on-demand operation.

I still use CreateSpace, though, and I still recommend it. You should go in with eyes wide open — that’s why I took the time to complain yesterday — but all of their problems are understandable. They’re trying to find profit margins while also opening up the market to writers in a way we’ve never seen before, and at the same time they’re wrestling with all the punishing old physics of real things.

The Problem with Paperbacks

CreateSpace is fun. Print-on-demand publishing can now get you a souvenir copy of your novel that looks like it was printed by a traditional publisher. That’s cool. Your friends and family will order a bunch of copy, and even hand them out.

But when it comes right down to it, we’re not going to make it as self-published writers in the real, physical space. That market still belongs to bookstores and traditional publishers. The thing is…that market is shrinking. It’s failing. Major bookstores have spent the last two decades putting all the indies out of business, and now the major bookstores are starting to shut down.

And at the same time, the market for e-Books is exploding. And that’s where things get interesting.

Kindle Direct Publishing

Kindle Direct Publishing allows you to create an e-Book project, provide a title and an author name, a content file and a cover image (and here it really is just a 600×800 jpeg image), and then name your price. Click “Publish” and your book is for sale on Amazon, right next to Dan Brown’s and Stephenie Meyer’s.

There are several catches in the process. First, you’ve got to have a good book, and you’ve got get it formatted so it will work on the Kindle (or other e-reader). You can usually just upload a Word document, or even a PDF (if you made the PDF right), and when you do, their software will do its best to convert that into the proper digital format.

Anyone who’s spent much time doing automated digital conversions can tell you that’s a tricky process, though. It’s worse, too, if you’re working with MS Word files. If you did anything tricky in your book, chances are good it’s going to look weird on the Kindle. Even if you didn’t, you might have trouble.

That’s where our custom publishing software, BookMaker, really comes in handy. But I’ll talk more about that later. In the meantime, you can do a few things I’ve been recommending for a while, like sticking to standard body and heading styles, and keeping your formatting to a minimum. Put your story in the words, not in the fancy designs on the page, and everyone wins.

Product Pages and Bestseller Lists

Once you have an e-Book, it’s easy enough to share it with the world. As I said, all you’ve got to do is give it a price and a name, and Amazon will give you a product page. If you’ve got a paperback copy of the same book out, you can even contact Amazon and ask them to link the two up (so customers can easily see the other options, and reviews for one version will show up for both). This process can take up to a week to resolve, though, so plan ahead.

Some of the other information you can supply for your product page includes a product description (which is considered just as important as the quality of your cover art for determining success), and up to two “categories” for your project — what you might think of as genres. For Ghost Targets: Expectation, I listed it under “Science Fiction > General” and “Mystery and Crime > Women Sleuths.”

And that’s where some of the magic happens. See, Amazon is in the business of connecting buyers with things they’d like to buy. In essence, the company is as much an advertiser as a retailer, and with a little bit of luck you can get a lot of free advertising out of them.

When it comes to books, Amazon keeps Bestseller Lists. So let’s imagine you’re a big fan of Science Fiction, you’re a Kindle owner, you’re sitting in line at the DMV with another hour’s wait ahead of you, and you’ve just finished the last book in the last series you had planned to read.

The Kindle makes it incredibly simple to pull up the top 100 bestselling Science Fiction titles, and browse until you find one that catches your eye. It provides an overall Top 100, too, but that’s intensely competitive. Once you get down to a narrow subcategory, though — say, for instance,

Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Technothrillers

suddenly it’s not too hard to get noticed. (Gods Tomorrow, which I somehow got to list under five sales categories, has spent a total of twenty days so far on the Technothrillers Top 100.)

The trick  is to get on one of those narrowly-focused lists, get noticed by some new readers (which should get you new sales and move you up higher on other lists), and then eventually move from “Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Technothrillers” to “Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers” to “Books > Mystery & Thrillers” to “Books.”

And “Books” is a very nice place to be. Once you’ve got a book on that list, you can quit your day job. In the meantime, your job is to write a good story, design a good cover, come up with a good description, and among them find the audience to start your book moving up the lists.

I’m a week late posting this, and you’ve all got my apologies for that. I ended last week’s conversation on self-publishing with Thursday’s claim that it’s an author’s responsibility today to learn the hard work of publishing.

Here’s the thing: it’s tough work. I’m a week late posting this because I’ve been in a steady, quiet little crash ever since last Tuesday when I published Expectation.  I spent the last six weeks pouring everything I could into the production and distribution process, trying to get everything ready, and in the midst of that I was even doing frantic rewrites (as I’ve mentioned).

And then, last Tuesday, it all ended. I took a deep breath…and crashed. I’ve spent the last week doing very little of anything.

Content Creation

As artists, most of us aren’t really cut out to be publishers. The difference between the two exists (and has existed for a very long time) for a perfectly natural reason. Courtney and Becca will both talk to you about the difference between right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers, and most of us do this because we want to indulge in the creative process.

We want to lose ourselves in the unreal, to elevate ourselves above the mundane. That doesn’t have a lot of overlap with cool, practical business sense. We create content because we want to, but then someone starts telling us we need to find an audience. We need to perform audience analysis. We need to write a synopsis (or a query letter, if you’re still chasing legacy publishing), and find a way to tell our story in a different…worse way.

I could say this is the difference between amateur and professional art, but I think that’s being a little too generous. No, this is the difference between art and hobby. If all you want to do is the fun stuff, the self-indulgent self expression, then writing is your hobby. If you want to raise it to an art, then you have an obligation to bring your vision to your audience.

Content Production

I’ve been told a painting isn’t really ready for public display until it’s been framed. There’ve been times in my career when that seemed really weird to me. You can’t paint a frame. A frame is woodworking. It’s a totally different skill. It’s unfair!

But that’s the reality of the situation. The frame (or “framing,” I should say, or maybe “finishing,” because it’s not always a bordering frame we’re talking about here…). Ahem. I lost all my momentum inside those parentheses.

The “finishing” of a painting says a lot to a viewer. It gives a context for the image, provides boundaries and states definitively, “This is it.” That’s a problem we all have to deal with as artists — knowing and accepting when a given work is finished, because we could always do a little something more.

Maybe that’s why art so consistently requires intervention from someone else near the end of the process. We need framers. We need editors. We need publishers and cover designers and marketers — not because we can’t fill those roles, but because bringing someone else in to help “finish it off” gives us a solid endpoint.

Content Packaging

It does the same thing for readers. I’ve been guessing at it for years, but I can now tell you from experience: readers respond differently to a “finished” book. If you hand someone a printout of your manuscript, they’re going to flip through it thinking, “Hmm. I wonder why he decided to write it that way. I wouldn’t have done that. Maybe this character should do something else instead.”

Hand them the same novel printed and bound, with a lovely glossy cover, and they’ll think, “Wow! Where did he come up with that idea? I never could have made up a world like this. What an imaginative character!”

And creating that reaction in readers is part of the art. It’s not writing — it’s photography and copyediting and cover design and interior design and print selection — but it’s part of the art you’re participating in as a writer.

You can leave that aspect of your art in the hands of a publisher. Maybe that’s your heart’s desire. There are some compelling voices saying it’s a bad idea, though, and even some reasonable voices saying it might not be an option for much longer.

No matter what your end goal is, if you’ve got any interest in your craft, I’d encourage you to dedicate some time to learning its finishing process. You don’t have to become an expert, but at least pay attention. Learn to recognize all the pieces that go into making a finished product, and recognizing good craftsmanship when you see it.

I’ve decided to go ahead and spend a couple more weeks on self- and indie-publishing, sharing some of my experiences with you and giving you and idea where to look. After that (as promised back in January), I’ll turn to creative writing techniques I’ve learned in my Master’s program. This really strikes me as a worthwhile diversion, though.

See you next week!

On Tuesday, I published the second book in my series. I posted the same little sales blurb in half a dozen different places, but around here I gave a little something extra. I told you about the process of writing the series, and my plans going forward.

That’s not necessarily something I talk about a lot, because I’m always afraid of my own fickle nature. A 25-book series is going to be part of my life for a very long time, and there’s always the chance I’ll get tired of it. There’s always the chance I’ll run out of material, or just start hating my characters. So I hedge my bets, and I say, “long-running series” instead of “25-book series.”

Writing a TV Series as Novels

My job here is to talk about the writing process as it is, though. And this is part of it. I do want to write a 25-book series built strongly on the TV series model, and there’s no way to do that by accident. It has to be planned in excruciating detail, so I’m not using vague phrases like “long-running series” in the privacy of my own head.

I’ll come up with a quirky character on my drive to work. And then I immediately start browsing the spreadsheet in my head, trying to figure out exactly which of the 21 unwritten novels the character would best fit in.

Courtney wants to develop a social media story that develops over the course of a month in the form of blog posts, complete with a fake profile for the character, and probably even profiles for the character’s network of “friends.” Joshua has been talking with me about writing a story that’s not particularly aimed at religious folks, but works as a strong allegory (none too popular with traditional publishers).

I know some students in my program at OU who have put together and are selling a Choose Your Own Adventure e-book. Joe Konrath, famous proponent of digital self-publishing, has released one of those, too. The medium makes that easier than ever (both to write and to read).

Some of the most fun we ever have as writers are in these little “project novels.” It’s critical to have a good story, no matter your gimmick, but sometimes it’s the challenge or just the fun of a gimmick that gives a book the appeal we need to finish it.

The problem is, traditional publishers are conservative. It’s part of their economic model. By and large, traditional publishers want you to send them books that look pretty similar to the books that are selling well right now.

Amateur Publishing

That’s one of the big advantages of self-publishing. If I want to write a 25-book sci-fi series broken up into 5 seasons, I can do that. I don’t have to sell the idea to anybody. If Courtney’s weird story idea becomes a reality, she’ll be able to publish it. She’ll be able to find her own audience. Same for Joshua’s allegory.

Of course, this has always been the case. It’s always been possible to self-publish, but the difference now is that the technology and the media available make it surprisingly easy to match traditional publishers in terms of distribution and professional presentation.

That’s something Joshua and I were discussing last week: packaging and presentation. In the middle of a conversation on the topic, I said:

I think to be a really good writer, you need to be self-published. You need to craft the medium, as well as the message.

Up until now, I’ve been talking about the “get to.” I get to publish my TV series in novel format. Courtney gets to publish her social media story.

But there’s more to it. There’s a “need to.” All these new tools make it possible for you to make your little amateur novel look as good as one produced by Random House, and that’s an unprecedented and overwhelmingly cool opportunity for authors.

It’s also a responsibility. They’ve been telling us for years that it’s our job to build our platforms now. Now I’m ready to take that one step further. It’s our jobs to build our own media.

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you just how Consortium Books goes about doing that.

First things first, I need to take care of a little business. You might have already seen this on one of my other sites, but I’ve got three significantly different audiences across all three and,  y’know, I really need to let all of them know.

After all, it’s a good book. You should read it. After you’ve checked out the little advertisement and clicked through to buy your copy, join me below the horizontal rules, and I’ll tell you a little bit about the writing process.

Announcing the Release of Ghost Targets: Expectation by Aaron Pogue

The series continues! Aaron Pogue and Consortium Books are proud to announce the digital release of Ghost Targets: Expectation, the hotly-anticipated sequel to Gods Tomorrow.

Eric Barnes put an end to human aging. Now he’s paying for it with his life.

FBI Special Agent Katie Pratt returns to the Ghost Targets team to find herself and the rest of the team under investigation for corruption by a government agency. Katie’s relationship with Martin Door, one of the creators of the Hathor system and its surveillance of everyone and everything, leaves her especially vulnerable.

The new boss assigns Katie to a case in Boulder, Colorado, to save her from ongoing interrogation, but the case quickly steals the Ghost Targets team’s full attention. A scientist, violently attacked in his own lab, is in a coma.

The victim leads the research for a drug that could end human aging, extending lifespans to thousands of years. The key to the drug is locked in his slumbering brain, but even in this world where every action is recorded in Hathor, the records of the attack on him are gone. Katie must uncover the truth to protect the miracle drug and regain her own reputation.

Katie’s search for answers will force her to scale a mountain of secrets and lies whose summit is the overwhelming power of human expectation.

Available for Kindle, Nook, and all other e-readers at $2.99. (The paperback edition is also now available.)

Man, that’s exciting. You could probably tell from my opening paragraphs, but the sales process really isn’t my thing. I wasn’t born to hawk my wares, digital or otherwise. That said, I was born to write exciting stories.

I’ve told the story behind several of my stories here, including the story about Gods Tomorrow falling fully-formed into my life. I had a couple months at most to dream up an entire novel, and that novel became the birth of my professional career as a writer.

I haven’t told the story about the sequels, though. As you know, I wrote Gods Tomorrow during NaNoWriMo. Thanksgiving always make a big ol’ roadblock right there at the end of November, but this time I was cruising into it. I’d developed this incredible world, I’d finally figured out who my killer was (although my protagonist was still completely in the dark), and I got Trish to agree to drive the long road to Little Rock so I could spend the time scribbling on chapter 13.

I was doing just that, somewhere outside Fort Smith, and all of a sudden I stopped. I picked up my pen and turned to look out the window. And then, for the first time, I really started thinking about the end.

Not the climax. I’d been thinking about the climax ever since chapter 2, and in chapter 13 I was standing on its doorstep, but I hadn’t really thought about what would happen next. Now, I pressed my head back against the seat with my mind racing.

“You know,” I said quietly, “I think this could be a series.”

“Oh yeah?” Trish asked, not really paying attention.

I shook my head. “No, I mean…like, a TV series. Like Law & Order or Bones. The characters I’ve set up, the world…it would be perfect.”

I had some clue how one would go about writing and pitching a TV series, but it involved moving to Los Angeles somewhere early in the process and I wasn’t interested. The more I thought about it, though, the more right that felt. Gods Tomorrow was like the pilot, the special 2-hour miniseries event, and Ghost Targets would be the series that came out of it — Katie Pratt and the Ghost Targets team pursuing the mysteries revealed in Gods Tomorrow but, at the same time, handling regular cases, week-to-week, and in the process bumping up against all manner of crazy and clever criminals.

I couldn’t shake the idea, and within a couple weeks I decided I just had to go ahead and write the series that way. Ghost Targets: Expectation starts a few weeks after the end of Gods Tomorrow and opens with Katie coming back to work and receiving her next case. It’s the first regular “episode” in the long-running series.

And it is long-running series. Before the end of that first December, I had the rough shape of it sketched out: 5 “seasons,” each united by a single overarching themes but featuring 5 “episodes” (the actual novels) that progress the season and series plot, but also individually introduce and resolve their own story plots.

That’s 25 books, and in the two years since I’ve told a few people about my grand plans — and maybe I’ve grinned like a lunatic at their astonished reactions, but I’ve never given up on it. In fact, I’ve been working on the outline, and I’ve got pretty solid plans for all 25 now, and definite plots for at least half of them. As of last November, four of them are now done.

And today, the series becomes a reality. You can pick up Ghost Targets: Expectation at e-retailers everywhere (look at my commercial above for the full list of links). It even features a teaser for episode three, Restraint, which should be available in August.

That’s slow for a TV show, but it’s pretty impressive for a novel series. Come back Thursday and I’ll talk about the process — about how we’re publishing the Ghost Targets books and all the rest. For now, help yourself to a second dose of Katie Pratt.